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multibooting windows,linux,osx with 2 hds


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I need some help with multibooting Ubuntu, Windows XP and 7, and OS X (with Chameleon v2.0RC2 installed) over two hard drives: XP/7 on first drive, Linux/OS X on second. When booting from the second Chameleon detects XP/7 NTFS partitions on the first drive but when I go to either from Chameleon, they dont start properly (terminal-like cursor in top left). When I boot from the first drive, XP starts up and XP only, as XP was installed after 7 (previously had Vista but deleted it). Chameleon does not detect Linux drive (even OS X refuses to mount it with ext2fsd). When I try to restore the Windows 7 bootloader, the install disk won't even detect my installation of 7. XP's boot.ini doesn't allow much, but I think I can get 7/XP dual-booting from the first drive with OS X/Chameleon on the second. So the questions are:

 

1) Will installing Grub kill my Chameleon?

2) Can I somehow boot to the Linux drive from XP bootloader?

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  • 3 weeks later...
I need some help with multibooting Ubuntu, Windows XP and 7, and OS X (with Chameleon v2.0RC2 installed) over two hard drives: XP/7 on first drive, Linux/OS X on second. When booting from the second Chameleon detects XP/7 NTFS partitions on the first drive but when I go to either from Chameleon, they dont start properly (terminal-like cursor in top left). When I boot from the first drive, XP starts up and XP only, as XP was installed after 7 (previously had Vista but deleted it). Chameleon does not detect Linux drive (even OS X refuses to mount it with ext2fsd). When I try to restore the Windows 7 bootloader, the install disk won't even detect my installation of 7. XP's boot.ini doesn't allow much, but I think I can get 7/XP dual-booting from the first drive with OS X/Chameleon on the second. So the questions are:

 

1) Will installing Grub kill my Chameleon?

2) Can I somehow boot to the Linux drive from XP bootloader?

 

  1. Installing GRUB might or might not "kill" Chameleon, depending on how it's done. If you install GRUB to the MBR of the boot drive, it'll overwrite the part of Chameleon in that location. If you install GRUB to the Linux boot partition, Chameleon will be untouched. In fact, to boot Linux from Chameleon, you must have GRUB (or perhaps LILO) installed in this way; Chameleon can't boot a Linux kernel directly, just a Linux boot loader. (Likewise, AFAIK GRUB can't boot OS X directly; it needs an OS X boot loader like Chameleon to finish the job.)
  2. There are Windows boot loaders that can redirect the boot process, but AFAIK they all have the same limitation as Chameleon: You'll need GRUB or LILO on a Linux disk to finish the job. I haven't kept up with Windows boot loaders, though, so I don't know precisely what they can do.

 

Overall, I recommend you follow this procedure:

 

  1. Back up the boot loaders on both your physical disks. You can do this from either Linux or OS X. The command is "dd if=/dev/sda of=foo.img bs=512 count=1". In this case, /dev/sda is a Linux device identifier for the first SCSI or SATA drive; /dev/sdb is the second SCSI or SATA drive, /dev/hda is the first PATA drive, etc. On OS X, you'd use /dev/disk0, /dev/disk1, etc. Put these files somewhere you can get at them easily from any OS, such as a USB flash drive. The 512 value will back up the entire MBR, including the primary partition table (or protective MBR, if you're using GPT partitions); change that to 440 to back up only the current primary boot loader. This step is your insurance policy in case something goes wrong. The backups can also be used in certain GRUB configurations, but I won't detail them since you probably won't need them.
  2. Configure GRUB. This is a complex topic in and of itself. Your distribution may have already created a /boot/grub/menu.lst or /boot/grub/grub.conf file, or you may need to track down some examples. Windows-booting examples are easy to come by. If you plan to use GRUB only for Linux, and use Chameleon for Mac OS and Windows, just stick to the Linux configuration. You may need to use a Linux CD/DVD boot to get this job (and the next step) done.
  3. Install GRUB on the Linux system's boot disk (the root filesystem or the /boot filesystem). The command, in Linux, is "grub-install /dev/sda1" (changing the device identifier if necessary; note that you're installing to a partition, not the whole device).
  4. Reboot and see if Chameleon now picks up Linux as an option. If it does, picking that option should show you the GRUB OSes you configured a couple of steps ago.
  5. If you can now boot all your OSes, great. If not, read on....
  6. If you can't boot one or both of your Windows installations, first try removing the bootable flags from their partition table entries. Personally, I'd do this with Linux's fdisk, but there are other tools that'll do the job, too. I've recently discovered that Windows 7 RC, at least, boots fine without this flag set, and its presence on a hybrid MBR seems to confuse Chameleon.
  7. If removing the boot flag doesn't help, then you can set up GRUB to remove the bootable flag from one Windows installation and add it to the second one when you boot the second Windows system. Try this. (Post again if you can't figure out how to do this.)

 

Additional options include installing GRUB to your main hard disk's MBR and using one or more of the MBR backups you made in step #1 as a GRUB target, effectively giving you more MBR boot loader installations than you have hard disks.

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  • 2 weeks later...
Guest hacker2021

http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/2461/os_x_triple_booting_xp_vista_osx86_vista_bootloader_chain0_method/

 

Replace any reference of 0chain with tboot, shouldn't be too hard.

 

Oh and tboot should be put in the C drive.

tboot.zip

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